Close Read: The Thinking Man’s War

“So, men and women, American troops, coming out of Iraq,” David Letterman said to President Obama. This was after Letterman and Obama established that the President is black, and had been even before a majority of voters elected him. Letterman continued,

And now, people are suggesting more and more American men and women going to Afghanistan. What is that?

Yes, what is that? The Obama Administration’s answer to General Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, which calls for the deployment of more forces there, is, basically, that he wants to think about it. “I’m going to ask some very hard questions,” he told Letterman. (Politico calls the leak of the McChrystal paper “A D.C. Whodunit,” and has a list of suspects.) According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon has asked McChrystal to hold off for a moment on his formal request for more troops—he is said to want forty thousand more—while the White House figures out if this is something it really wants to do.

For some, this is a little too much thinking. House Minority Leader John Boehner seemed annoyed that Obama didn’t just thank McChrystal and get the soldiers marching, saying in a statement,

I am deeply troubled…by reports that the White House is delaying action on the General’s request for more troops and questioning its strategy…the longer we wait the more we put our troops at risk.

And the Washington Post had a rather petulant editorial this morning, complaining that it was “a little startling” to hear Obama say, in the course of his record-setting media blitz on Sunday, that he was “not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan” and would be reviewing the strategy. There was a review this spring, the Post notes. Wasn’t that enough?

The generals believed they had Mr. Obama’s commitment to their approach…. Now the president appears to be distancing himself from his commanders.

Maybe he is. On Letterman, Obama’s shorthand for a troop-increase strategy was a “double-down.” But he is the one who was elected, and the generals weren’t. Or maybe he isn’t: the Journal notes that the Pentagon has won this sort of battle before, and a strategy review doesn’t mean that Obama has said no to McChrystal. He might just want him to ask more nicely.

The Post editorial ackowledges that the fraud in the recent Afghan presidential election is part of the issue here,”sharpening questions about whether the government can be a reliable partner.” Why does it matter if Karzai’s government is corrupt and illegimate, if he lets us chase bad guys? Take this anecdote, in another story in the Post on the McChrystal approach:

In early July, Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked senior U.S. officials to dispatch a company of about 100 U.S. soldiers to Barge Matal, a village in the northern half of the province that is home to fewer than 500 people. Taliban insurgents had overrun the community and Karzai was insistent that that U.S. and Afghan forces wrest it back from the enemy. “I don’t think anyone in the U.S. military wanted to be up there,” said a senior military official who oversees troops fighting in the village.

So Karzai, effectively, picked the target, overruling American commanders. Why was Barge Matal so important to him? Maybe he was being brave and farsighted and just wanted to beat the Taliban. Or maybe in this village—or in another one, somewhere else, soon—he had some other business. Karzai struck deals with all sorts of warlords and alleged narcotics traffickers before the election. Are our troops going to end up returning whatever favors he did for them? At least one Americam soldier died in Barge Matal, according to the Post, and several others were wounded. The operation ended up lasting two months, until last week. Why so long?

Some insurgents seemed to be moving into the area from neighboring Pakistan solely to fight the U.S. troops there, said military officials.

As Letterman would say, what is that?

From Letterman, Obama moved on to the United Nations; he’s headed for Pittsburgh and the G-20 next. The Steelers will be out of town, so the President won’t get to gloat about how the Bears beat them. Not that celebrity fans helped the Dolphins last night: they lost to the Colts, despite the presence of part-owners Serena Williams and Marc Anthony, accompanied, respectively, by Venus Williams and Jennifer Lopez. Then again, are any of them as overexposed as the Colt’s Peyton Manning?

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.